Fall for the Book – a DC-area literary festival – began Sunday and will run through Friday night. On Tuesday night, poet Robyn Schiff will be reading at George Mason University from 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. (Grand Tier III, Center for the Arts). I have been reading Schiff’s second book, Revolver, in which she examines the inventions originally displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 through a contemporary lens. Using objects as diverse as a sewing machine, revolver, envelope machine, prefabricated home and eighty-blade knife, Schiff reminds us how the machinery in our lives defines, separates, and coaxes us to evolve in different ways.

As the title image suggests, our creations – regardless of their original intentions – can lead us toward violence and psychological estrangement. In the poem, “Colt Rapid Fire Revolver,” Schiff describes the sugar gun-adorned wedding cake of inventor Samuel Colt and his new wife, suggesting that the fortune that makes their marriage possible comes with a price:

…the cake
was six feet high and how could I resist
pistols winding tier up-

on tier up the icing reverberating in
decoration the prudence of
a revolver’s placement in the holsters
of a row of guards under whose raised arms that
beam a private arbor the
bride and bridegroom enter their union. Re-
petition of pistols

map a rebus of progress marching since the first
firearms to devise a weapon
that can repeat fire without reloading.

Similarly, in “Silverware, by J.A. Henkels,” Schiff uses the example of a silverware factory to demonstrate how technology slowly invades our lives:

A pettiness in me was honed
in this cutlers’ town, later bombed,
in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born there
alongside my wedding pattern, could hear
the constant sharpening of knives
like some children hear the corn in their hometowns
talking to them through the wind.

The book presents a world that is simultaneously being built up and broken down. As demonstrated by the many-bladed knife in “Eighty-blade Sportsman’s Knife, by Joseph Rodgers & Sons,” we cannot predict the complications – “all the ways a point mutates” – that our inventions create:

What catalog
of hot tools. Splayed it is

a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates. It
contains the bayonets piercing
the chain mail at the end of the mind.

When something new is invented, an old technology is left behind, to founder or reinvent itself. In “Project Huia,” a city is rebuilt on unstable ground:

Built on the site of a massive earthquake
in the Hawkes Bay region of New Zealand…
an Art Deco city
with lightning bolts and sun bursts carved
into its white stone walls stylizes
annihilation. Obliteration is an

opportunity.

In “Lustron: The House America Has Been Waiting For,” the speaker leads us through the strange new world of a prefab house:

It’s so safe here, porcelain flowers
live forever in a porcelain-reinforced
saferoom, luster on steel like
living in the barrel of a mythic Glock. Imagine a whole
life that feels like the satisfaction of passing through security with undetectable
weaponry in your carry-on.

Anyone who has ever tightened a leaky faucet, built a shelf, or changed a tire knows the unique satisfaction of having a hand in making something work. Schiff suggests that this feeling of “rightness” can be dangerous, absolving us of responsibility for what we have created:

It is a joy to place the Philips-
head in the Philips-shaped slits
in the world. Twisting it, you can feel the
rotation of the earth, you can feel the
revolution in your

wrist.

…When we use the
tool intended for the job
we are neutral. The right tool for the right
task is objective truth.

The book’s final poem, “Project Paperclip,” reminds us that however our inventions enable us, nature and new technologies are constantly unravelling them. Here, a maid in a garden finds that she can no longer read the assembly directions of folding chairs etched into their wood, as insects have made that impossible:

…lines of poems Chinese woodworkers once
carved into joinery of portable furnishings
to guide reassembly when the

maid charged with dismantling chairs
in the rhododendron garden is called away
before having time to reconstruct
them in the fragrant orchard…

(how will she join the pieces
when Asian Longhorned Beetles
colonize arm rails seatbacks
headrests emendating what’s
written there by chewing a
recess in the bamboo-strip

veneer, a wall-niche in a
beetle cloister, laying eggs
where a stone patron would a-
wait the second coming deep
in the alcove of the word)…

This final poem – with its imagery of 9/11, the bombings of World War II, and the colonization of America – reminds us that the acts of creation and annihilation are part of a much larger “game:”

…Had

you lost an eye in World War
II you would have been fitted
with a glass ball made in a
marble factory in Lau-
scha, Germany, and seen the
new world from the point of view

Next week, the Fall for the Book literary festival takes place at various venues in and around Washington, DC. (The full schedule is here.) One of the many fine poets featured at the festival is Shara Lessley, whose book Two-Headed Nightingale won the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize. She will be reading at Old Firehouse #3, a restaurant/bar in Fairfax, Virginia, on Friday, September 27th from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., with poets Carmen Calatayud, Joseph Ross, and Donna Lewis Cowan.

In the title of the book, Lessley invokes the nightingale – a bird imbued with symbolic meaning by poets throughout the ages, most famously in Homer’s Odyssey – as a symbol of lament, tragedy that must be overcome, and a lost voice that must be found. Lessley finds meaning in the journeys of birds, bats, and marginalized creatures that must transcend the darkness of their experiences. In image-rich verse, she presents the natural world and its inhabitants as “two-headed,” darting between entrapment and freedom, silence and crescendo, paralysis and flight.

In the first leg of her journey, the speaker experiences a forced stillness:

In the dark undersurface of sea,
five hundred fathoms beneath,
dark as the giant squid’s indigestible beak

tight in its bony crate. Like a bird of fire caged
its throat repeats two notes two notes…

— from “Metronome”

As the speaker progresses, we see a shift from paralysis into slow movement, in the ability of even the smallest creature, or seed, to grow. This “breaking” and “dispersing” is part of the healing, and a rejection of the old mythologies that would enclose her:

I first read Melanie McCabe’s beautiful first book of poetry, History of the Body, last year, but it seems right to talk about it now, in this season of heat and harvest. As the title suggests, this is a book that revels in the visceral and bodily, and in the poems she writes about summer, McCabe finds a multiplicity of meanings in the season.

In many areas of the country, summer is hurricane season. In McCabe’s poem “Waiting for Power,” a family mourning over the loss of a father is pitched again into darkness:

…The sultry
swell of heat filled the room from the ceiling down, so Mama
peeled off her dress and leaned

in her white lace slip before the narrow
yellow flame–a daguerreotype, an oval-flamed ancestor from
the cracked album in the cedar chest. Hours passed without
clocks. The heat moved back

and forth with our fans, but it was still
heat, and no men came to put things right.

Similarly, in the poem “Safe,” the speaker finds safety from the storm in her home:

All day at the glass the wind swoops,
dives, rallies, looks for cracks to permit
entry–but caulk holds. Panes shake.

I look through them at the storm. All day
the air conditioner thrums off and on.
All day July transpires outside the glass.

In McCabe’s poems, summer is a season marked by desire, and the waiting game that must be played. The imagery in her poem “Ripe” illustrates this tension:

The long tendrils of the melons rustle as they creep
from the garden. The moon is the only eye to see,
but in my bed I listen for the whisper of green on green.
____________________________________________
My vigil to morning weaves between nerves and dream.
Somewhere tongues take sacraments, glistening and sweet.
I knew this night always, before I planted a single seed.

Her poem “Patience” reminds us of all that waits for us, even when the world seems still and barren:

Emptied of desire for whatever it is that horses desire,
they bide
their hours, reconciled to the day’s slow, scorching
revolution across the bent stalks and red earth, patient in
their bodies’ memory that evening always comes, that winds
can stir,
that the field is not lost to them, but waiting.

Most interesting to me are McCabe’s poems about summer that focus on its dark side: how summer forces us to confront our pasts, and how the physical world becomes a reminder of those lost summer loves. The next two excerpts beautifully convey this melancholy:

From “Translation From The Green:”

Between the trees, you say, there are spaces where we can
reclaim what we have lost. A quiet is there that will always

remember who we were. Nothing is on our lips now but flat, doltish
words. It is leaves and branches only that allow us to hear the wind.

From “This Wide World:”

You have always known how the earth can be excavated, changed, then

reunited with itself, or how a flower can travel miles to finish its life far from
where it began. Once you showed me a sky you called live-for-forever blue,

as if we might, as if that were possible. Sometimes I search for your name
to find out if you are gone. Death would be an explanation I could understand.

I know you think of me. The wind tonight is freighted with honeysuckle
and salt. The moon slides like a postcard in and out of the clouds.

McCabe’s poem “The Body Goes To The Beach” takes a familiar source of summer self-consciousness – how we appear in a swimsuit – and turns it into a deeper moment of mortality:

What once paraded, strutted to be seen
now only hopes to move unnoticed among

this supple horde, this muscled flesh–
a spy stealing from corner to lamppost,

from gray to gray. To be unlit, to take up
no space. We have nothing to wear but

the body, this old thing…If it makes

a sound, it will be the clicking of needles
pulling taut a gap, an unravel in yarn.

It will be the tick of insect legs over
gift wrap…Bones rehearsing their pop

and clatter. Their star turn.
Their last role.

As the summer progresses, I’ll share more of my seasonal favorites – but I think McCabe’s poetry is an excellent place to start.🙂

Last Thursday was the last day of elementary school in our city, and my first-grade daughter alternated between summer-fun-anticipation and heartbreak about no longer seeing her adored teacher every day. I picked her up from school, and seeing all the teachers waving goodbye to the kids as we passed was more than we could take. By the time we made it to the car, my daughter was crying, I started crying because she was crying, and my other daughter started crying as well. Her last day was doubly poignant since she will be starting at a new elementary school next year – in our city, kindergarteners and first graders attend a separate school – so that will be a big change.

Happily, when we unpacked her backpack several hours later, we found a sheet with the teacher’s home address, with the suggestion that students become her penpals. My daughter got immediately to work on a letter, which said simply, “I miss you SO MUCH!!!” I’m sure her teacher will be impressed by the depth of her feelings, particularly when she had left her class only four hours earlier.🙂

Although I’ve had a number of wonderful teachers, I felt particularly fond of, and changed by, my third grade teacher; most people seem to have such memories of a special elementary school teacher. There is something about the relationship between student and teacher in the early years that is particularly moving and powerful. Perhaps it is our first major exposure to a real authority figure other than our parents, someone who is not just babysitting; someone responsible for both our academic and social development and able, even in a packed classroom, to make us feel special and unique. Someone who – unlike a parent – is able to see our strengths and weaknesses in a more objective way. Someone who helps us find our footing in the world outside of our family, who shows us the many possible paths.

My daughter’s first grade teacher was such a teacher, and I think that’s why I was crying harder than my daughter: I know that her next teacher may not connect with her in the same way. When we send our children off to school, we want them to receive something like the love they feel at home; we want them to be accepted, encouraged, hugged, high-fived for even those small successes. When a teacher is able to do that – while also juggling the tasks of classroom life, and the similar needs of other children – it is nothing less than miraculous.

I wanted to share an excerpt from my poem, “Children,” which describes how our children bloom as they encounter new worlds:

Spring, and I watch you from my chair,
streaming electric, gathering gravity
around you like permanent planets.

Jeff and I spent Memorial Day weekend sans kids in Pittsburgh. We decided that since east-bound beach traffic would be heavy, heading west was a good idea, and Pittsburgh is only about four hours from DC. So off we drove, in the stunned silence of burned-out parents of small children, into the real world.

Pittsburgh sits at the point where three rivers meet, and its historic bridges (446 of them!) define the city. We walked four miles the first day, just wandering, stopping for beer and fried oysters at the Original Oyster House, and ending up at the Penn Brewery for cheap, excellent microbrews and pierogi.

The next day, we were excited to visit the museum of Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol, which features not only his iconic artwork, but the many films he made and the TV specials he hosted in the early 1980’s. There was also a duplicate of his “Silver Clouds” installation from the 1960’s; basically, Mylar balloon “pillows” in a room, floating courtesy of wall-mounted fans. I imagine this would be great for kids, but the adults were having a lot of fun too. Most unique were his “oxidization paintings,” which were created by having friends urinate on a canvas coated with metallic paint. The colors varied according to the chemical contents of the urine; Warhol was said to be preferential to one of his assistant’s urine, which created especially vibrant colors.

We also took the short trip up the Monongahela Incline, which is still used for travel up and down Mt. Washington. The view is phenomenal:

We finished the day with friends, enjoying dinner at Soba and fireside hometown brews at Porch.

This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
This dark is a major nation.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in midpassage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.

…Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke…

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself.

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

2) A Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter, 1966″ by James Wright (full text here):

At the edges of Southeast Asia this afternoon
The quarterbacks and the lines are beginning to fall,
A spring snow,

And terrified young men
Quick on their feet
Lob one another’s skulls across
Wings of strange birds that are burning
Themselves alive.

3) “Learning Experience” by Marge Piercy:

I have come out on the train from Chicago to talk
about dangling participles. I am supposed
to teach him to think a little on demand.
The time of tomorrow’s draft exam is written on the board.
The boy yawns and does not want to be in the classroom in Gary
where the furnaces that consumed his father seethe rusty smoke
and pour cascades of nerve-bright steel
while the slag goes out in little dumpcars smoking,
but even less does he want to be in Today’s Action Army
in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala,
in death that hurts.
In him are lectures on small groups, Jacksonian democracy,
French irregular verbs, the names of friends
around him in the classroom in Gary in the pillshaped afternoon
where tomorrow he will try to fail his license to live.

Someone is alive.
Someone, perhaps, is alive. But we, here,
absorbed in listening to the ancient voice
seek for a sign that outreaches life,
earth’s dark sorcery
where even among the tombs of rubble
the malign grass rears up its flower.

I have trouble getting anything done when there is visible clutter. This morning, the house was overrun with scattered toys, cuttings from various papers, books, and game pieces. So I spent twenty minutes getting everything back to its container and shelf. Unfortunately, there are always items that defy classification, don’t really have a place: kid’s meal toys that must be kept until they are forgotten about (for us, about a week); pieces large or small from games that are temporarily missing; “prizes” obtained from school – like decorative erasers – that must be kept but aren’t useful; bottles of soap bubbles. I guess everyone needs a junk drawer for all these things, so that the house doesn’t resemble the Island of Misfit Toys, and I found a deep basket to accommodate all these random shapes and sizes.

In one’s life, there are many such junk drawers. I have a writing binder – containing failed poems, interesting lines I’ve written but never used and probably won’t, heartening letters from mentors – that although I rarely look at it, would never throw away. The kitchen cabinet with rarely-used appliances reminds me on the bleakest days that I can whip up a Margarita in just moments. These stashes are different from the photo boxes or love letter bundles that are irreplaceable; they contain objects of often irrational desire, rather than things we solidly love or need. Similarly, I find I get antsy when I don’t have enough incoming randomness in my life, whether it is a new friend, book, or image that pops out from nowhere – a junk drawer of the mind, so to speak.

I love Radmilla Lazic’s poem “Anthropomorphic Wardrobe” (translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic) for its interesting take on the objects in our lives. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s no more room. We are full.
Everything we stored, layer by layer
Folded, packed in as if bandaging wounds…

Forgotten. Taken down in a hurry.
Thrown in the corner: Turned inside out.
What is indispensable and what is less so
Thrown on top of each other.
Once made to measure, then grown short,
Grown too tight, faded or shiny — it’s all here.